Regular readers of this blog know my affinity for the tablet. I like using them, I find they fit my life very well and it's a common site to see me with one tablet or another in my hands. I believe that I am not alone with my preference for the slate, but when it comes to hard numbers there haven't been any to indicate that there is a sizable market for any tablet other than the iPad.

Samsung got some traction last year with the global release of the Galaxy Tab, but the sales numbers bandied about for this tablet were called into question. I don't remember seeing any hard proof that Samsung has sold millions of the Galaxy Tab as originally indicated. This is my tablet of preference, so I think it's possible Samsung has sold a lot of them, but I have seen no proof of that.

The Motorola XOOM was the first big tablet to hit the market with the Android Honeycomb operating system optimized for tablets. It was released with a big advertising campaign in the U. S., so if any non-iPad tablet should have created a splash it should have been the XOOM. Analysts are painting a very grim picture for sales of the XOOM, so it doesn't look like it has proven there is a real market for an Android tablet.

There are a lot of other Android tablets getting ready for market, and the HP webOS-based TouchPad is too. These follow on the heels of the BlackBerry PlayBook, which is aimed at the enterprise. While these are happy times for a tablet fanboy like me, there is simply no hard proof that there is a market for any of these tablets, no matter what some analysts may predict. The only tablet that has been proven in the market is the iPad, both first and second generation, and its success is driving the rest of the industry to try and cash in. I hope they do, but it's not a given it will happen.